It’s a Revolution! No, Really This Time!

Bitcoin is a revolution. Well, that’s what they say, anyway. Who are they? The believers. The denizens of online chat rooms and boards who belong to ideologies that most people will never encounter in the real world. The most popular strain that runs through bitcoin believers, though, is the belief that governments are not serving their citizens well. This anti-government view is propped up by movement heroes like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, and the unlikely inclusion of Ross Ulbricht and Roger Ver. Bitcoin, the believers will tell you, is change. Bitcoin will remove the status quo and replace it with something new and better. Rapid, exciting, and non-stop change. So why is the bitcoin movement finding it so difficult to change their own status quo when it comes to topics like censorship, transaction capacity, mining decentralization, and competitor “alt-coins”?

A group of individuals separated geographically and linked by their interest in a commodity unlike any before it is bound to have interesting debates. A feature of the internet generation has been the